Ever anxious to put back all his bits and pieces, he seems fussy and particular. ![]() The groundskeeper becomes more and more fleshed out as you take apart his garden. “Every character has a little list of things that they care about that maybe no one else does, and that’s a really important part of the game,” says Gillespie-Cook. When you see that the groundskeeper cares about his radio, then that’s a red rag to your desire to run off with it. Thought bubbles also give characters a sense of interior life, since they let you know about what objects are important to them. “If you’re wondering how to make him fall on his bum and you keep seeing him think about the stool, then that’s our prompt that you’re going to have to give it back.” “We’d add a thought bubble, so he gets one with a big picture of the stool and he’ll look around and scratch his head a bit,” says Disseldorp. What if you see the stool and run off with it before you know the man will try to sit on it? Since House House never wants to arbitrarily stop you from taking and hiding things, they figured the solution came down to being extremely clear about what’s important to the man. “That’s a good description of economical,” says Gillespie-Cook, laughing.īut then they had to account for players not understanding the gag’s setup. “There’s going to be a relatively economical way of translating that joke that requires having a stool and a harmonica and maybe a hat.” “Like, you’re going to pull a chair out while someone’s sitting down and they’re going to fall on their bum,” says Disseldorp. So the first step in designing an area was figuring out what items were necessary to tell the jokes they wanted. “Really, any goal in the game can be broken down as, ‘How are you going to use these items to achieve this comedic outcome?’” says Gillespie-Cook. Yes, Untitled Goose Game is also a game about jokes, and it tells them through its objects – the garden sprinkler, the mallet-on-the-thumb, the automatically opening umbrella which sends every nearby item flying (this is Disseldorp’s favourite: “we imagined it being a little bomb you could set off”). ![]() “We liked the moment that people broke two of them, and then get to the third and say out loud, ‘Right, this is my last one,’ and inevitably they’d break it as well, and she’ll get a new pint glass that was hidden before and put it out for you.” In the pub, you’ll see only three pint glasses which you need to steal and drop in the canal, and they’re extremely easy to break. Later, the game plays with your fears about losing items. “It doesn’t make a heap of sense but it outlets into the canal so that items end up somewhere you can get them from later.” “There’s a well in the centre of the town and we wanted people to be able to drop things down it, because it’s funny, but we then had to make a little outlet at the bottom,” says Disseldorf. Things are so important in Untitled Goose Game that you can’t destroy them. So we were exploring ways of bringing out different parts of a game about stealing things and having people take them back.” “Or let’s try and make you take someone’s hat, which requires them to bend over. “Rather than just having objects on the ground, we’d clip keys to someone’s belt,” says Disseldorp. The next step was to think of different ways the goose might take objects. “It was very clear that your goal is to cause chaos and the characters’ goal is to tidy it up,” says co-developer Stuart Gillespie-Cook. Take an object and the person will chase you and then try to put all the objects back in their places again. We just thought that people in a public space might be doing something like eating, and it’d be very clear that you wouldn’t want a goose to take it from you.”Īt this point, House House had already nailed the fundamentals of what you play today: a goose, a person and a bunch of objects. “It isn’t actually in the game now,” he says. The first item that developer House House put into the prototype that became Untitled Goose Game was, Disseldorp thinks, a pie. They play a really central role in so much of what we do, and how people play.” “Items are the language of the game,” co-designer Nico Disseldorp tells me. After all, it takes things to mess things up. Apples, hair brushes, keys, mallets, toy planes, tulips, teapots. But under all that, it’s a game about things. Untitled Goose Game is a game about being a horrible goose, about making a mess and watching hapless Brits try to clear it up again. This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they’ve taken to make their games.
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